Below are my highlights from my 2014 Reading List.
You have 22 highlighted passages
Last annotated on November 4, 2013
“Sometimes people don’t
understand the promises they’re making when they make them,” I said. Isaac shot
me a look. “Right, of course. But you keep the promise anyway. That’s what love
is. Love is keeping the promise anyway. Don’t you believe in true love?”
“The fault, dear Brutus,
is not in our stars / But in ourselves.” Easy enough to say when you’re a Roman
nobleman (or Shakespeare!), but there is no shortage of fault to be found amid
our stars.
and even though I was in
bed and he was in his basement, it really felt like we were back in that
uncreated third space, which was a place I really liked visiting with him.
You are so busy being you
that you have no idea how utterly unprecedented you are.”
glass eye turned
inward,’” Augustus began. As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep:
slowly, and then all at once.
although I had a moral
opposition to eating before dawn on the grounds that I was not a
nineteenth-century Russian peasant fortifying myself for a day in the fields.
“We age slower when we
move quickly versus standing still. So right now time is passing slower for us
than for people on the ground.”
“I’m in love with you,
and I’m not in the business of denying myself the simple pleasure of saying
true things. I’m in love with you, and I know that love is just a shout into
the void, and that oblivion is inevitable, and that we’re all doomed and that
there will come a day when all our labor has been returned to dust, and I know
the sun will swallow the only earth we’ll ever have, and I am in love with
you.” “Augustus,” I said again, not knowing what else to say. It felt like
everything was rising up in me, like I was drowning in this weirdly painful
joy, but I couldn’t say it back. I couldn’t say anything back. I just looked at
him and let him look at me until he nodded, lips pursed, and turned away,
placing the side of his head against the window.
“Some tourists think
Amsterdam is a city of sin, but in truth it is a city of freedom. And in
freedom, most people find sin.”
“Do you know,” he asked
in a delicious accent, “what Dom Pérignon said after inventing champagne?”
“No?” I said. “He called out to his fellow monks, ‘Come quickly: I am tasting
the stars.’ Welcome to Amsterdam.
“People always get used
to beauty, though.”
do not know which to
prefer, / The beauty of inflections / Or the beauty of innuendos, / The
blackbird whistling / Or just after.’”
“That’s what I believe. I
believe the universe wants to be noticed. I think the universe is improbably
biased toward consciousness, that it rewards intelligence in part because the
universe enjoys its elegance being observed. And who am I, living in the middle
of history, to tell the universe that it—or my observation of it—is temporary?”
It seemed like forever
ago, like we’d had this brief but still infinite forever. Some infinities are
bigger than other infinities.
want more numbers than
I’m likely to get, and God, I want more numbers for Augustus Waters than he
got. But, Gus, my love, I cannot tell you how thankful I am for our little
infinity.
The pleasure of
remembering had been taken from me, because there was no longer anyone to
remember with. It felt like losing your co-rememberer meant losing the memory
itself, as if the things we’d done were less real and important than they had
been hours before.
I posted it and waited
for someone to reply, refreshing over and over again. Nothing. My comment got
lost in the blizzard of new posts. Everyone was going to miss him so much.
Everyone was praying for his family. I remembered Van Houten’s letter: Writing
does not resurrect. It buries.
“It’s total bullshit,” he
said. “The whole thing. Eighty percent survival rate and he’s in the twenty
percent? Bullshit. He was such a bright kid. It’s bullshit. I hate it. But it
was sure a privilege to love him, huh?” I nodded into his shirt. “Gives you an
idea how I feel about you,” he said. My old man. He always knew just what to
say.
Grief does not change
you, Hazel. It reveals you.”
My thoughts are stars I
can’t fathom into constellations.)
You don’t get to choose
if you get hurt in this world, old man, but you do have some say in who hurts
you. I like my choices. I hope she likes hers.
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